ABOUT US
We’re passionate about all things fermentation.
Our highly skilled team of cellular farmers are lovingly raising quality liquid yeast cultures in our custom-built yeast lab.
TASTE NATURE
We believe that flavour can be used as a medium for storytelling, and the story we want to tell is one about Aotearoa, its unique environment, and why we should care about protecting it. We’re working to unlock the flavours of Aotearoa through an extensive R&D project, harnessing previously undiscovered yeasts from our natural wildernesses and putting them into your pint.
CELEBRATE WONDER
Before the advent of microbiology, fermentation was thought to be a kind of wondrous magic. It was something mysterious and romantic in the air that caused one thing to miraculously bubble and transform into another. Here at Froth Tech we still believe in this romantic notion, and wish to celebrate the natural wonder that our environment provides through the joy of fermentation.
DRINK SCIENCE
When you drink a beverage brewed with Froth Tech yeast, you’re tasting the end result of a custom designed propagation process producing the freshest, purest, healthiest yeast possible. Beer is a really technical beverage, lovingly nursed to life through a number of complex & precise steps, guided by the creative expression of the brewer. We are fascinated by regional flavour & aroma signatures known as ‘terroir’ or ‘mauri whenua’ and in collaboration with some of Aotearoa’s leading fermentation scientists we are seeking to explore this through isolating, testing & categorising novel, native strains of wild yeasts.
THE TEAM
Simon Cooke
Co-Founder/ Right Brain
Simon studied Graphic Design at Massey University in Wellington, where he founded the Massey University Brewing Society, and brewed his first commercial batch of beer (2012). The passion grew through teaching other students how to brew, and organising craft-focused events to engage them with the emergent beer scene.
Simon then spent a couple of years overseas, brewing and exploring locations around Europe and Canada, and gaining a wider view of brewing knowledge. Following this he founded a contract brewing label, Kakariki Beer Co. to share his beer creations with a wider audience. In recent years he’s been flexing his creativity and ideation in the startup scene, supporting social enterprises and impact businesses through graphic design, marketing, and meaningful events.
Connect with Simon on [LinkedIn]
Ryan Carville
Co-Founder/ Left Brain
Ryan’s studies in Philosophy and Religious Studies were always going to lead him to yeast…. After years of homebrewing and volunteering at beer festivals, Ryan took up his first commercial brewing gig at a brewery in Christchurch (2015). There he handled all aspects of the brewing process and got to engage with punters and the industry, working at every major beer festival in the country.
After moving to Wellington he spent much of his time at the Wild Workshop working for Garage Project, making all kinds of barrel-aged, funky, sour and spontaneously fermented brews. It's the intersect between art and science in beer that really gets Ryan going. He's a lover of flavours and fermentation, flora and fauna, and thrives on problem solving and coming up with ways to do things efficiently.
Connect with Ryan on [LinkedIn]
OUR IMPACT
We love nature, and coming from Aotearoa New Zealand we’re lucky enough to be surrounded by an abundance of natural beauty and unique biodiversity. Yeast is a single celled living organism that originates in the natural world and has been domesticated by brewers over centuries, through generations of reuse.
OUR FOOTPRINT
Froth Technologies is committed to a future where our biodiversity is increasing, not rapidly disappearing as it is now. In 2022 we measured the carbon footprint of our business operations for the past 12 months.
Our footprint is already quite lean based upon emissions minimising decisions made when setting up our business (like electric heating elements instead of gas-fired). We have volunteered to offset our remaining carbon footprint by 120% with Ekos , granting us Climate Positive certification. We know we can’t offset our way out of the Climate Crisis, but we want to take responsibility for our unavoidable emissions as part of our business operations.
R&D
R&D
In November 2019, after over a year of research and planning, Froth Technologies began a research and development project with the goal to find, isolate, characterise, and commercialise previously undiscovered yeast from the wildernesses of Aotearoa.
Working in collaboration with some of NZ’s leading fermentation scientists, Froth Technologies has co-designed a process to select specifically for new strains of brewing yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae).
The project involves travelling across Aotearoa, to isolated areas of dense native bush. From here samples will be taken from specifically selected New Zealand botanicals, which will then be transported back to the lab for processing.
The drive behind this project is the exploration of mauri whenua (terroir ‘the essence of the land’). We believe flavour can be a medium for storytelling, and one of the most important stories that we at want to tell is that of Aotearoa, our unique environment, and why we need to work to protect and restore our natural biodiversity. Wild yeast has the potential to remind us of local places and spaces through the particular flavour expression imparted in beer, by strains that have evolved in specific areas of our unique ecosystems.
OUR PROCESS
Our yeast propagation process has been custom designed to grow healthy, pure yeast cultures - and it all starts with a few million cells. Cultures are individually selected from plates inoculated from our working slopes - the intermediary between our cryo-bank, where our mother cultures are stored at -80°C, and active propagations. Propagations are aerobically incubated and checked daily to monitor vital metrics, and incrementally fed larger and larger volumes of growth media in a precise ratio to achieve maximum growth and health.
From a start of only a few million cells, our largest propagation vessel produces more than 100 trillion yeast cells - enough to ferment over 10,000L of beer! At this stage our propagations are monitored in real time via a live fermentation monitoring system, giving us the ability to ‘see’ inside of our tanks through the lens of key fermentation parameters.
At all stages of propagation; from the first streak on a plate through to our 1500L YPV, Froth yeast is grown on a nutritionally enriched, all-malt growth medium to ensure it is acclimatised and ready to start fermentation in the maltose-rich environment of beer fermentations. The nutritional composition of our growth media is high in Free Amino Nitrogen, minerals and other trace elements that are essential for growing vital, healthy yeast.
Purity of cultures is achieved through high levels of sterility and hygiene. All inputs for our propagations, from the air we inject to maintain aerobic fermentation, to the largest volumes of growth media we prepare, are all processed to achieve sterility. We use a 2 stage HEPA filtration process for our air, UVC sterilisation for our water, and a custom designed pressure kettle for our media, allowing us to boil this at 121°C and 15 PSI.
These front end measures are coupled with comprehensive Quality Control throughout the propagations, including 3 stages of selective media plating used to identify the presence of common brewery spoilage organisms and to monitor for morphological consistency batch to batch.
From the first streak to the final package, Froth Technologies’ yeast is grown with the utmost care and attention, so you can be confident that nothing but the best goes into your tanks.